Stop, Thief!
One of the costs in hosting a website is bandwidth – the amount of data downloaded from your web site. While browsing thru the access_log file, which lists what files are being downloaded, I noticed a number of entries from some of the social web sites. Entries that were just pointing to an image, not a web page. What to do? Point them to something else.
If you have the ability to create a .htaccess file on your web server, just add these lines:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([a-z0-9\-]+\.)?myspace\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([a-z0-9\-]+\.)?xanga\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ /images/monkey.gif [NC,L]
Now all image requests from myspace look like this:
